Read Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You for Free Online

call your girl students fond exasperated dirty names, are there phone calls from insulted parents, does the Dean or somebody have to explain that no harm is meant, that writers are not as other men are? Probably not, probably no one minds. Outrageous writers may bounce from one blessing to another nowadays, bewildered, as permissively reared children are said to be, by excess of approval.
    I have no proof. I construct somebody from this one smudgy picture, I am content with such clichés. I have not the imagination or good will to proceed differently; and I have noticed anyway, everybody must have noticed as we go further into middle age, how shopworn and simple, really, are the disguises, the identities if you like, that people take up. In fiction, in Hugo’s business, such disguises would not do, but in life they are all we seem to want, all anybody can manage. Look at Hugo’s picture, look at the undershirt, listen to what it says about him.
    Hugo Johnson was born and semi-educated in the bush, and in the mining and lumbering towns of Northern Ontario. He has worked as a lumberjack, beer-slinger, counterman, telephone lineman and sawmill foreman, and has been sporadically affiliated with various academic communities. He lives now most of the time on the side of a mountain above Vancouver, with his wife and six children .
    The student wife, it seems, got stuck with all the children. What happened to Mary Frances, did she die, is she liberated, did he drive her crazy? But listen to the lies, the half-lies, the absurdities. He lives on the side of a mountain above Vancouver . It sounds as if he lives in a wilderness cabin, and all it means, I’m willing to bet, is that he lives in an ordinary comfortable house in North or West Vancouver, which now stretch far up the mountain. He has been spo radically affiliated with various academic communities . What does that mean? If it means he has taught for years, most of his adult life, at universities, that teaching at universities has been the only steady well-paid job he has ever had, why doesn’t it say so? You would think he came out of the bush now and then to fling them scraps of wisdom, to give them a demonstration of what a real male writer , a creative artist , is like; you would never think he was a practicing academic . I don’t know if he was a lumberjack or a beer-slinger or a counterman, but I do know that he was not a telephone lineman. He had a job painting telephone poles. He quit that job in the middle of the second week because the heat and the climbing made him sick. It was a broiling June, just after we had both graduated. Fair enough. The sun really did make him sick, twice he came home and vomited. I have quit jobs myself that I could not stand. The same summer I quit my job folding bandages at Victoria Hospital, because I was going mad with boredom. But if I was a writer, and was listing all my varied and colorful occupations, I don’t think I would put down bandage folder , I don’t think I would find that entirely honest.
    After he quit, Hugo found a job marking Grade Twelve examination papers. Why didn’t he put that down? Examination marker. He liked marking examination papers better than he liked climbing telephone poles, and probably better than he liked lumberjacking or beer-slinging or any of those other things if he ever did them; why couldn’t he put it down? Examination marker .
    Nor has he, to my knowledge, ever been the foreman in a sawmill. He worked in his uncle’s mill the summer before I met him. What he did all day was load lumber and get sworn at by the real foreman, who didn’t like him because of his uncle being the boss. In the evenings, if he was not too tired, he used to walk half a mile to a little creek and play his recorder. Black flies bothered him, but he did it anyway. He could play “Morning,” from Peer Gynt , and some Elizabethan airs whose names I have forgotten. Except for one: “Wolsey’s Wilde.” I learned to